I liked this piece of writing from Arthur Goldhammer’s “consistently excellent”:http://artgoldhammer.blogspot.com/2009/02/fissures.html blog on French politics.

It’s always interesting to watch the fissures develop in the Socialist Party. It’s almost a geological process. Each aspirant is a tectonic plate moved by the immense pressure of his or her ambitions. For a time a couple of these plates may move in tandem, but then an opposing force impinges from some odd angle, subduction occurs, and one begins to witness surface changes: a ridge or wrinkle developing here, a fissure there.

No sooner did Martine Aubry open the party leadership to a dozen or so Royalistes than we witness[ed] the emergence of a first fissure …